I Am Madame X (10 page)

We rose from the table and went to the gallery. Grandmère and Julie stood to embrace us. Julie was leaning on her canes. “Take care of Valentine’s portrait for me,” Mama said.

At the mention of Valentine’s name, Grandmère began to sob. I had only seen her cry twice before. The first time was when we left Parlange, during the war, and the second time was at Valentine’s deathbed. Then she had wept quietly, modestly. Now her tears came in a great, noisy torrent.

She had survived so much—the deaths of her husbands and two of her children, the war. Those tragedies had somehow hardened her will to endure. But she was an old woman now, with creaky joints and liver spots on her cheeks. She thought of Parlange as a refuge, a nest in which her family could gather for comfort and protection. Valentine’s death had shattered her.

Mama and I climbed into the buggy next to Charles. He snapped the reins, and the two brown mares trotted off. Grandmère leaned against the railing, her chest heaving, her face contorted with sobs. Turning and waving, I watched Grandmère as the buggy rattled down the alley of oaks, until she disappeared into a blurry dark form between the gallery’s tall white posts.

Following an uneventful crossing to Le Havre, Mama and I boarded a train for Paris, arriving on a cold night at Gare Montparnasse. We took a cab to a small Right Bank hotel, the Albion, left our trunks with the concierge, and went to the dining room, where a fire crackled in an enormous stone hearth. Settling ourselves at a table by the window, we ordered the bouillabaise and ate silently.

Our room on the third floor was a cramped space just big enough for a chair and a small four-poster. That night, Mama and I slept side by side under a heavy, flowered cotton quilt. The next morning, we awoke refreshed, donned clean frocks and warm jackets, and set off for a walk along the boulevards.

It was a frigid day, though clear and sunny, and after a half hour our toes and fingers stung with numbness. At the Palais Royal, we ducked into a restaurant for coffee and croissants and visited several shops. Mama bought each of us a wool shawl and herself a fox-fur pelisse. Then we boarded an omnibus headed in the direction of the Couvent des Dames Anglaises.

We were on our way to talk to Mother Superior about my reenrollment. At first, Mama had insisted I attend Sacré-Coeur, the most fashionable girls’ school in Paris. She thought hobnobbing with the mothers of little nobles would make her more elegant. But I had put up such a storm of protest at the idea of a new school that she finally agreed to send me back to the English nuns.

The omnibus clattered along the new asphalt boulevards, past the old, crooked side streets with their small shops and high shuttered houses. Fifteen minutes later, we arrived at rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor. We stepped to the curb and walked a block north. My eyes darted up and down the street in search of the convent’s entrance. Gone. In place of the dear old buildings was a vast triangular lot filled with rubble. Next to it, at the spot I gauged to have been the nuns’ mint garden, was a circular pit—what I later learned was the ruins of an ancient arena, the Arènes de Lutèce. The site had been buried for twelve centuries; no one knew it existed until the convent was destroyed.

I ran toward a group of men who were bowed under heavy coats, their breath steaming in the cold. They stood in the rubble, consulting a long scroll.

“What happened to the convent?” I cried.

“It was razed last month on orders from Baron Haussmann,” said one man. “We’re putting a street through here.”

“Where are the nuns?”

“I’m not sure,” said the man through his ice-spangled mustache. “I heard they were relocated outside Paris.”

The thought of never seeing Sister Emily-Jean again, of never playing in the lovely garden with the old wishing well and the statue of the Virgin, triggered a fresh sorrow, and tears sprang from my eyes. As I stumbled away, a shard of red glass flashed in the rubble beneath my feet—a piece of one of the chapel windows. I picked it up and put it in my jacket pocket.

Mama was standing on the corner with her small fists digging into her hips. “Well, I guess you’re going to Sacré-Coeur after all,” she said triumphantly.

“I’m not!” I shouted.

“You will do as I say, Mademoiselle.”

“I will not. You can’t force me.”

I ran toward the tree-dotted place de la Contrescarpe, past the flower sellers and the dingy cafés. I ran and ran, down the steep pitch of the rue Mouffetard, dodging pedestrians and baby prams. Two stocky matrons who were walking with linked arms cried, “
Mon Dieu!”
as I sped toward them, and they swooped apart to let me pass.

“Mimi! Mimi!” Mama called after me. I turned and saw her about a block behind. She was running, holding her skirt up with one hand while she held on to her feathered hat with the other. I picked up my pace but tripped on my hem and stumbled in front of Plessy’s tobacco shop. A second later, Mama caught up to me and grabbed my jacket sleeve. She slapped me hard across the face. I slapped her back.

A few passersby, appalled at the sight of a mother and daughter publicly fighting, stopped and whispered to one another behind gloved hands. A tear rolled down one of the red stripes that blotched Mama’s left cheek. Her eyes burned into mine, and she spat her words: “I
used
to have a daughter.”

Over the next few weeks, Mama and I saw little of each other. Most days, I would stay in our tiny room, reading and writing letters to the family at Parlange. Mama wandered Paris in search of a permanent home for us. Eventually she settled on a large, elegant three-story house—a
hôtel particulier
—at 44, rue de Luxembourg, in the heart of the faubourg Saint-Honoré, a gleaming neighborhood of freshly paved streets, new stone buildings, and trimmed trees, not far from the Madeleine.

The double parlor and dining room had trompe l’oeil ceilings painted with dancing cherubs, and elaborate paneling carved with garlands and birds. Mama filled the house with red-and-blue velvet upholstery, billowing taffeta draperies, gilt mirrors, crystal chandeliers, china, silver, and marble busts—a sumptuous decor that used up a great deal of her inheritance. Indeed, after buying and decorating the house—a fit setting, she believed, from which to launch herself into French society—we had left an income of thirty thousand francs a year, about what a bourgeois doctor earned.

Servants were cheap—a month’s wages for a maid was equivalent to the price of a bottle of table wine—so Mama was able to hire a staff: two footmen who boarded out, a driver who bunked in a room in the carriage house, and three maids who lived in cramped rooms under the eaves. But our budget for clothes, food, and entertaining would be tight.

After considering her finances, Mama decided I didn’t need to go to Sacré-Coeur after all, or, in fact, any other school. At my age—eleven—she announced at breakfast one morning, “a girl has all the education she needs.”

I was ecstatic at the thought of no more school. What child wouldn’t be? I envisioned a life of sleeping late, reading romances, and wandering Paris whenever I wanted. The fact that not going to school would mean I’d have little chance to meet friends my own age, or that it would push me into adult activities before I was ready, didn’t occur to me. When I did think of friends, of course, I thought of Aurélie, and always with deep regret. I wondered what had become of her, and I longed to see her again.

Since I had musical talent, Mama decided I should continue piano lessons, and she hired as my teacher a middle-aged man named Edward Vaury. He showed up for my first lesson on a Wednesday morning. I was waiting for him in the main parlor, and a minute after I heard the bell ring, the maid brought me his card. Monsieur Vaury turned out to be a short, round man dressed in an ill-fitting black suit that was shiny with age. “Bonjour, Mademoiselle, I’m very pleased to meet you,” he said, bending stiffly at the waist.

“It’s my pleasure, Monsieur.”

As a little boy growing up in Vienna, Monsieur Vaury had been taught by a student of Beethoven’s, and he resembled the great composer, at least superficially. The top of his long head was bald, while a semicircle of sparse gray hair sprouted from just above his ears and fell in a frizzle to his shoulders. He was the only man I knew in those days who didn’t have a mustache—perhaps he was
trying
to look like Beethoven—and he wore thick, round spectacles that slid down his fleshy nose.

“Well, let’s see what you can do. What would you like to play?” he asked, pushing his spectacles in place with a curled forefinger.

I volunteered to try Chopin and from memory played the Polonaise in A Major.

“Very good, my dear,” said Monsieur Vaury, clapping his dry red hands. “I heard a few wrong notes. But never mind. Now let’s see how your sight reading is.”

He fumbled in his case and placed several yellowed sheets on the music stand. It was the difficult third movement of Beethoven’s “Moonlight” Sonata. I struggled through the first measures—I had never played it before—striking many wrong notes, faltering, and finally giving up.

“Not bad for a first try,” Monsieur Vaury encouraged. “You can work on it this week.”

He put me on a rigorous schedule of scales and finger exercises. The grand piano in the parlor had a clear, beautiful tone, but I preferred to practice on the spinet in the privacy of my blue toile-walled sitting room. The piano stood between two windows fronting rue de Luxembourg. With the shutters open, I could hear the hooves of cab horses lightly clicking along the smooth asphalt, a pleasing metronome.

Here, at the piano in my room, I did not feel Papa’s and Valentine’s deaths as crushingly as I had everywhere else. The harmony and rhythm of music eased my sadness and pushed me back toward optimism, my natural temperament. I practiced as much as I could, sometimes for four or five hours a day.

Monsieur Vaury marveled at my progress. He rarely criticized me, though one morning after I had been studying with him for about two years—a period during which I had grown two inches and sprouted breasts—he complained about my fingering in Chopin’s Etude in E Major. “Mademoiselle, you should not be using the one and the four in the right hand. Try the one and the two. Then you can reach up with the five to hit that G.” He was sitting next to me on the padded piano bench, and now he swung his right arm across my back and placed his hand on top of mine. He arranged my fingers under his in the desired position and pressed my hand into the keys. A lovely inverted E chord splashed into the air.

“There. Much better,” he said.

He released my hand but did not shift his weight, so that he was still leaning into me. I felt his stale breath on my neck. Then he moved his hand to my shoulder and stroked it slowly. I leaned as far as I could to the side while still keeping my fingers on the keys. But he moved even closer. A lock of his stiff gray hair fell across my cheek. I shuddered.

Later, after he left, I told Mama what had happened.

“I’m sure you’re imagining it,” she said.

“I’m not! He’s a lecherous buffoon. I wouldn’t be surprised if we saw him one night at Velfour’s with a
fille publique
from La Farcy’s brothel.”

“Mimi!” Mama’s eyes widened.

“Besides, he isn’t a very good pianist. I don’t care if he studied with Beethoven’s student. He has no ear, no true feeling for music. I would like another teacher. Or no teacher. I can work on my own.”

But Mama refused to dismiss Monsieur Vaury, because he also taught Princess Mathilde’s nephew. I don’t know how Mama hoped to benefit from this weak connection to Napoleonic royalty, but one of her chief ambitions was to secure an invitation to the Princess’s salon at her palatial hotel on rue de Courcelles.

The following week, I began a campaign to drive Monsieur Vaury away. I refused to smile at him, ignored his compliments, and spoke to him as little as possible. No matter how coldly and unpleasantly I behaved, however, his ardor grew. He stared adoringly at me. Sometimes he was so moved by my playing that he would grab my hands and cover them with kisses. Other times, he stretched his long ape’s arm across the back of the piano bench, which led inevitably to his touching my shoulder. Then one day, as I finished playing Schubert’s Sonata in C Minor, he moved his hand to the back of my neck and stroked it lasciviously. I vowed to get rid of him.

For several days, I thought of little else, but by the time of my next scheduled lesson, I had not come up with a suitable solution. Then, as I waited for Monsieur Vaury in the parlor, my eyes wandered toward the Louis XVI secretary near the fireplace. Suddenly I had an idea. I grabbed the sheet music off the piano stand, unlocked the door of the secretary, and removed a pen and bottle of ink. Holding my right hand steady with my left hand, I drew in two flats in the third and eighth measures on the first page. Just as I finished, the bell rang, and I heard the maid’s heels clacking across the floor. I dashed toward the piano, replaced the sheet music, and flopped into a settee. My heart was hammering in my chest.

Monsieur Vaury stepped into the room. His smile showed a jumble of large, knobby teeth. “Good afternoon, Mademoiselle. How is the Chopin coming?”

“You be the judge,” I said sweetly.

I arranged myself on the piano bench and spread my skirt out so as to leave no room for the dry old man. But Monsieur Vaury pushed the folds of green faille aside with his forearm and slid onto the bench beside me.

I began to play. Monsieur Vaury stopped me in the fifth measure. “Excuse me, Mademoiselle. This is the key of E major, so that B is not flatted.”

“But the composer
has
flatted it.” I tried to sound innocent.

Monsieur Vaury blinked and squinted at the music as I continued to play. A minute later, he stopped me again.

“Mademoiselle, you have flatted another B.”

“I know, Monsieur. It is flatted in the music.”

“I’ve played this piece a thousand times, Mademoiselle. You are striking the wrong note.”

“Look for yourself, Monsieur.” I pointed to the music.

Monsieur Vaury pushed his spectacles over his head and leaned toward the music stand, scrunching his forehead and narrowing his eyes to study the altered notes. “What do we have here?”

He recoiled from the music stand and stiffened his back. “I knew it! These flats have been drawn in!” He stared at me severely.

“Are you accusing me?” I said, coquettishly moving my hand to the base of my throat. I was enjoying his discomfort.

“Who else? Do you see anyone else in the room?” Monsieur Vaury’s jowls twitched, and he shook his gray strings of hair. “I won’t have this type of thing, Mademoiselle Avegno. I’m a serious musician. I won’t waste my time with foolishness.”

He jumped to his feet and began gathering up his music, muttering that women were weak, vain creatures, that we were all deceitful wretches, and that he was glad he had never married.

Mama later wrote Monsieur Vaury an apologetic letter imploring him to come back. He refused. We were not only silly women, he explained to her, but also Americans—in his view, a hopeless combination.

At the time, an influx of nouveau-riche Americans had descended on Paris, and their loud, spendthrift ways had sparked waves of resentment among the French. Suddenly everyone from the United States was seen as pushy and vulgar, a prejudice that severely hindered Mama’s social ambitions.